


They both bleed redder still

by Glass_mermaid



Series: Worthless Things [3]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, But we're getting there, F/M, Gingerrose - Freeform, Mutual Pining, One Step Forward, Pain, Romance, Soulmates, Unresolved Sexual Tension, unresolved everything, why cant I let these two be happy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-04
Updated: 2020-10-04
Packaged: 2021-03-08 04:07:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26809360
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Glass_mermaid/pseuds/Glass_mermaid
Summary: This girl makes him feel shaken, threadbare. She wears a part of him away with each breath she takes.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Rose Tico, Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Series: Worthless Things [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1782772
Comments: 8
Kudos: 36





	They both bleed redder still

**Author's Note:**

> I can diss redheads and Canadians because I am both.

The rain is dripping down the window panes like every moody film Rose had ever wept over in her angsty teenage years. The grey light bleeds over them both and his red hair burns like hot coals against the gloom. His profile is as sharp and unpleasant as the rest of him, skin as white as bone and splotched in lurid freckles, nose cutting a cruel angle against the dark. He's standing there deliberately where he thinks he looks his best, a cup of tea settled artfully in his long hand. He knows she can see him, counts on her appreciation as his due. Despite herself she devours him with her eyes, she always does, as helpless against it as she has been since the first time he walked into the bookstore.

-

It had been like a punch to the gut, a recognition and an awakening and a disaster unfolding before her stunned eyes. _Oh, oh,_ her heart had wept, _I know you._ There was something in the way he stood with his shoulders at uncomfortable attention, his nose in the air like a bloodhound catching a scent he disliked that rang through her soul like a bell toll. There was something in the constellation of freckles speckled over his face that itched in her fingertips, something in the hard bones of his jaw and cheeks that bled through her veins like a fire scorching through her. _It's you_ , she had breathed somewhere inside, inarticulate and raw.

He had stepped through the doorway of her little shop and his lip had been curled up in a sneer as he took in the shabby décor with ill disguised displeasure. His thin hands had curled around the lapels of his expensive peacoat dampened with rain as a lone drop trickled from the vicious orange slick of his wet hair and down his pale face. Rose had staggered to a stop in the middle of the room at the first glimpse of him, a copy of Pride and Prejudice clutched in her hands, and his eyes had lifted to her own for a split second where he had looked...

Annoyed. Unimpressed. Dismissive.

He had lifted his beak of a nose up slightly and scoffed at the enormously tall blonde woman Rose was only just noticing behind him.

“Surely we can do better than this?” he had hissed under his breath, peering at the shelves of books as though they had just spat on his shoes. That voice, sibilant and cold, walked up the rungs of her spine slow as a sigh.

Cheeks burning, insulted and confused, Rose had fled to the back while her heart thundered in her chest and pain iced over her veins. She chalked it up to having eaten a bad cookie on her break and brushed it off as best she could but there was an ache inside of her like she'd never felt before, as though she'd been reaching and reaching for something that her fingertips were finally brushing against only to realize it _burned_. Why did she already know that wouldn't stop her from reaching?

By the time she had returned to the floor he and the blonde were gone but he had managed to piss off both the barista in the cafe and the other clerk at the tiny vintage bookstore with his complete dismissal of their establishment. She had assumed she would never see that snooty jerk with the sharp eyes again but she had been wrong. He had shown up two days later by himself with a ridiculously expensive looking scarf tucked into a navy blue trench, his shoes so obnoxiously polished that Rose was convinced that he kept someone employed solely for that purpose. He had swept into the building and proceeded to stand in the middle of the entryway with an arched brow and a long suffering sigh. He had ordered a tea with lemon from the disgruntled girl who remembered him all too well and brought it to the small table by the window of the bookstore. He hadn't pretended to read a book. When she had shifted a look surreptitiously at him from below her lashes he had been studying her with an arched red brow and a look in his eyes she had no way of interpreting. He looked pensive and suspicious as his stare followed her. He said nothing. He didn't leave a tip.

After that he had come in every week or so, always ordering tea, sometimes bringing in his own newspaper and reading it from front to back. Sometimes he tidily took notes with an expensive ballpoint pen in a tiny, pretentious little black book. She had offered him a terse greeting one morning. He had scoffed as though she was ridiculous for even presuming to speak to him. Her spine had straightened like it was suddenly coated in iron, her hackles raised.

“You want to try that again, buddy?” she had snapped.

“A bloody American,” he had sighed, long suffering, and leaned back in the chair so effortlessly graceful and languid that she wanted to punch him in the jaw so hard he tipped right backwards onto the floor. “Outstanding.”

“Excuse me?” she had spat, hands now on her hips. “What, are we here to debate my colonial bloodlines? Should I apologize for not being born bowing to the Queen? You're in Seattle buddy, you're the odd one out here.”

A slight smirk had tugged at the edge of his mouth and Rose resisted the impulse to lean forward and press her fingers into the indent, to pull and push herself into his space like a tide rolling in.

“I shall endeavor not to hold it against you,” he'd drawled, returning his gaze to his cup and firmly dismissing her presence.

She had snatched up the very book he had had splayed open before him on the table and whirled away without another word. Cheapskate.

-

But he kept coming back, ordering the same tea and draping himself over whatever tables and chairs he deemed acceptable that day and retorting to her bare civilities with a waspish tongue until it brought them to the very _now,_ where he stood by the window in his cableknit sweater looking droll and impossible and why did she feel like she _knew_ the way he pushed a hand through his perpetually tidy hair? Why did the way he stood sentinel by the window with his arms behind his back and his feet planted firmly apart cut at her so sharply?

He wants her to stay hungry at the sight of him. He wants her mouth to water for bites he has no intention of giving. He slants her a sharp glance, eyes pale and silvered in the dreary light like the coins that covered the eyes of the dead to cross the River Styx. How fitting for him to come custom built with his own convenient currency. He'd even have his afterlife planned out and covered and probably insured.

“Did you need something?” he snipes, tipping his head in a way that's both sarcastic and arrogant. His skillset is varied in its cruelties. His red hair sweeps over his forehead and he brushes it back with a practiced flick of his wrist. His sweater, no doubt horrendously expensive and tailored to look exactly like the moody British boys in autumn fashion magazines, falls back from his skinny wrist. Her gaze flicks over the bared skin for a moment, a flare of lust she has no intention of letting him see shivering through her.

She shakes herself, shooting him a narrowed glance, annoyed by her own ensnarement and his apparent unruffled feathers.

What a horrible, nasty little _ginger_ he was!

“I'm just trying to put back some books” she snorts, pretending to be very unimpressed.

“I'm sure,” he sniffs, turning back to the rain as though it was vastly more interesting than her mere presence. To him it probably was. Her heart stumbled, sore, and she snatched up the first novel she saw and went back to the front desk. There's a quiet clink and murmur from the attached café that customer's waffle to and fro from, coffee and tea in their hands as they settle into the dusty old couches scattered throughout the store and peruse a novel or chat quietly amongst themselves.

Rose is happy there are other people around. They keep her from doing something stupid like talking to him. Never does she ever feel shorter and rounder and more worthless than when Armitage Hux is there. He's practically the written book of Arrogance. Tall, lanky, moneyed, cultured, cruel. She _despises_ him and cannot figure out why he keeps coming to this bookstore to sip tea he always complains about and finger through books he never buys.

And yet... and yet whenever he walks in its like he's magnetized and she's nothing but iron filings. She can't keep away. She aches to get closer, to cling to his pale skin.

She can't even figure out why. She doesn't even _like_ redheads, all pasty skin and flaming hair and spattered with freckles like spackling on a preschooler's painting. He was built like some sort of gaunt Bronte love interest too, like a normal man stretched on a rack till he was far too tall and skinny. He was abstractedly unappealing. And cold. And _rude_.

But sometimes she catches those cold, rude eyes on her when she's shelving the books or reorganizing the stacks and a heat flares through her that she can't deny. She wants him to _see_ her. She stands beside him at the window silently, feeling unwanted and hungry for something she doesn't want to name.

-

She has learned small things about him, as gradually and painfully as pulling wisdom teeth with pliers. He has no intention of making any of this weird association easy. She catches the looks he sends her, like she is hiding a weapon behind her back and he's just waiting for her to strike. He's as skittish as a cat in a room full of rocking chairs but he approaches the counter anyway, standing in front of it until she finally can't ignore him any longer and looks up, up, up to meet his narrowed eyes.

“My tea is cold,” he sighs pointedly as though she had everything to do with it.

“Then go ask them to heat it,” she says between clenched teeth.

“You don't look particularly busy,” he drawls, abandoning the cup on her desk.

She thinks about ignoring it, about knocking it down though that would just cause more trouble for her than him. Instead she snatches it up, noting its still hot enough to send prickles up her fingertips when she presses for too long.

She smacks the button of the electric kettle she knows he knows she keeps at her desk.

The door chimes, she hears it open and with it the sweeping wash of rain and cold air.

“Hux,” her ears pick up the low voice and she sneaks a look past the shelves to see a man even larger and more ridiculously romantic looking than Armitage. Tousled black hair and doleful brown eyes with a full, lopsided mouth and an almost excessively large nose. He's dressed in a black suit, a black tie knotted at his neck. His watch is huge and silver and classy enough to cost as much as a car.

“Solo,” Hux's voice is so ridiculously disdainful that Rose suddenly realizes that he's been going easy on her. “You look as though you've had a bad day.”

He sounds positively gleeful.

They sit for a long moment of silence where Hux sizes up this other man with slow, carefully disguised disdain. There's something there Rose can't put her finger on but she can recognize the scorn and disgust hidden carefully in the redhead's gaze. Subservience. Obeisance. This man is above him in the hierarchy and he _hates_ it. There's something in Hux's look that screams of feline eyes watching the watering hole from the tall grass, of fangs lurking about the ankle.

“I saw her again, the girl with the yellow bicycle. She was, she was putting something in the basket,” the stranger says, at least that's what she thinks he says. The other man's voice is low and deep and slightly nasal, like he's speaking from the back of his throat and he's just getting over a cold. He's American too or maybe Canadian. Not British like the redhead. He dumps his entire huge body into a ridiculous chintz loveseat with arms so frayed the stuffing is peeking out.

“So?” Hux scoffed. “Instead of approaching her you thought that agonizing over the mere glimpse of her in a dingy little bookstore in the rain like some sort of lovesick dreg was the sensible solution?”

Solo seems to finally take stock of his surroundings. His sorrowful brown eyes scan the room, land on the irritated Rose bristling at the insult than wildly back on his companion.

“A bookstore? When I texted you I didn't think about the address you gave me, I just... I can't just talk to her,” he mutters, swallows.

“I've known you for some time, Solo. You can't talk to anyone,” Hux sniffs delicately, crosses his long legs and leans back in his chair. Rose decided then that he looked like a spider. One of those spindly Daddy-Long-Legs that always end up startling you in the shower. Only suddenly in her mind the curtain is being peeled back by a pale, alabaster arm covered in freckles and he's stepping into the steamy heat of the showers with her and pressing wet, lurid kisses down her neck while his hands...

“Yeah, well.” Solo rustles nervously in his chair, runs his massive hand through his already tousled black hair. “She's... everything.”

“She is not,” Hux blows a puff of air through his nostrils, “ _everything_. At most she is something. At least she is nothing. You're not going to find love or whatever your maudlin interpretation of that base and overdone tripe is by sitting here with me lamenting about how you caught a glimpse of her effervescent beauty stuffing bread into a basket in the rain.”

The shower has quickly gone ice cold.

Slopping a splash of hot water into the tea cup Rose strides over and smacks it on the table before Armitage. His companion keeps his eyes focused on his hands like they contained all the worlds secrets, oblivious to her attitude.

“I can't get her out of my head,” Solo murmurs. He sounds pained, shaken. “When I saw her it was like catching a reflection in a mirror of someone I _knew_. There's something about her that... that its like I was _listening_ for. But every time I try to reach out the reflection is gone. I've lost sight of her in the crowd... It all goes quiet.”

“I don't believe any of that codswollop,” Hux spits, his hand curling around the porcelain without even a thank you tossed in her direction. “And besides, silence is golden. Useless chemicals and tangled hormones. Beauty is temporary and love is a lie. Track her down or don't, Solo. Just don't come weeping to me when she runs roughshod over you and you need a divorce lawyer since you forgot the prenup in your initial state of everlasting _bliss_.”

Rose refuses to look at him. She hides in the back until they're both gone. She feels emptied.

\--

America had never been Armitage's grand scheme, his end all goal. At best it was intended to be a rung on the ladder of his corporate success. It had its cultural highlights, its seedy underbelly and life affirming examples of human potential or whatever it was average people found interesting. At least it wasn't Canada, which had all the gentility of a jug of maple syrup. Their signature dish was a plate of greasy potatos doused in gravy and lumps of chewy cheese; hardly cuisine worth travelling for. Appalling, not to mention how they tacked on unnecessary syllables without necessity. Eh, indeed. Seattle at least allowed him to indulge in some of his finer habits. The west coast of the United States was even rain soaked and cloudy in a familiar British way that had at the very least kept him feeling grounded.

If anyone asked why he kept returning to some fusty bookstore selling below average quality tea clearly made from a boxed bag he would have had no answer to give. Why _did_ he? Surely not for the atmosphere. Perhaps he had a fetish for dust mites and battered copies of The Great Gatsby.

But even as he refused to admit it to himself he knew why. It just was so unspeakably foolish that it couldn't be borne. And so it would not be. 

-

The first time he had set foot in the pathetically kitschy store was after the heavy rain had deluged he and Phasma to the point that continuing onward was hazardous. The first time had been inconvenient, irritating. The first time he had lifted his eyes up and seen far more than he had intended.

A girl had been blinking at him with wide eyes in the middle of the store and something had hammered in his chest so hard he'd nearly jerked back into the rain. She was a tiny thing, lush and curved like a Pre-Raphaelite painting, jet black hair slipping down her shoulders just like the nymphs in those overdramatic frames. Sharp almond shaped eyes were trained upon him in a way that sent a thrill spiraling through his chest. _We've met before,_ he could recall thinking foggily. _I know the curve of your jaw, the edge of your teeth. There's something within you I'm supposed to find._

The earthquake shuddering through his chest sending his heart knocking about was as foreign to him as space travel. She wasn't even some kind of show stopping beauty. She was short and pretty enough in a homespun way so why did he find himself hissing something poisonous to Phasma in the hopes that she would step back into the rain and let him _flee_ from those startled brown eyes.

Instead the girl had quickly darted off and out of sight and he's brushed it off as dust allergies or some such and carried on with his day biting out irritated orders to the uncouth barista manning the coffee shop. His heart had beat a fierce drum against his ribs whenever his mind tried to catch back upon that dark eyed girl like a thorn on silk. He'd torn himself apart for days trying to forget her, catching himself angrily staring at his paperwork with knotted brow and narrowed eye without seeing anything before him. He was back in that dusty store watching the the waterfall of her black hair spill down her round shoulders. Eventually he'd decided instead to dig his fingers into the wound. There was nothing worse than a problem he hadn't planned for. Best to solve it.

He'd circled back through that neighborhood again and again. He'd taken to walking past the bookstore on his lunches, to searching the steady streams of passersby for another glimpse of that woman. He'd quickly capitulated and gone inside the store only to find her there again. An employee then. Fine. He would put his clever, expensive mind to good use and solve this riddle then wash his hands of the entire affair.

Sometimes he brought the newspaper to read the finances. Sometimes he did nothing but watch the people hurrying by. It quickly became a ritual he kept promising himself he would break as he had no _time_ for such lollygagging. There were things to be attended to, matters to get in order. There was coups and litigation and high stakes power struggles to bend his mind toward. Millions of dollars on the line for his clients any given day. He had no time to sit sipping substandard tea in a grimy bookstore because something in his chest loosened every time the girl walked past him even as his shoulders straightened up like a soldier at attention.

“Why do you come here,” Ben Solo had asked him after meeting him there for a quick go over of some financials. He was dressed in a charcoal grey suit so expensive and in such good taste that just the sight of him infuriated Hux. “this place really doesn't suit your M.O.”

“That's the point,” he had hissed. “Our competition is hardly going to look for me here. It's convenient for when I must keep a low profile or avoid the board or that nag of a secretary.”

But as Solo studied him shrewdly, his dark eyes hard, the girl wandered by on some frivolous errand and Armitage's eye _twitched_ with the restraint of not glancing at her. Solo shot a sharp look at the girl then met his eyes.

“Codswallop?” he asked, looking victorious. His dark eyes gleamed, his lopsided smile so smug that Hux had nearly kicked him as spitefully as a child on a playground. Only the viciously tight reins of self control he constantly kept saved them both.

“I haven't the faintest idea of what you're speaking about,” he had sniffed and his fists had curled underneath the table so tightly his knuckles were white. Solo could get under his skin in a way nobody else could. Handing him a weapon that sharp and obvious to use against him served no purpose. Ben Organa Solo, heir apparent, for all his foppish, sad eyed, long haired, lumbering charm act, was as calculating and vicious as Hux on his best day. It would never do to let down his guard around the other man though he was as close to what most would consider a friend as Armitage had ever had.

Besides, it wasn't a weapon, a weakness. It was wordless, void. The closest label he could pin to the strange, searching ache he felt whenever he saw the girl was deja vu.

-

Now, standing by the rain spattered window watching people dash to and fro ducked beneath colorful umbrellas with the dark haired girl standing beside him, Armitage can understand the agony that lurked beneath Solo's gaze every time he spoke of losing sight of that girl with the bicycle. He can understand what he meant by something within him _listening_. That something is screaming now but Hux is extremely practiced at being deaf to his inner voices. He's built a career around suffocating his conscience, he can pretend to hear nothing without batting an eye. He can smell her shampoo, something cheap and strawberry and no doubt loudly pink. He struggles with himself not to lean into it. He arches a brow and tilts his chin away towards the window while pretending to be fascinated by the view. He can see the tilt of her tiny nose, the shine of her jet black hair in his peripheral and feels a bit like he is tripping in slow motion. 

“Can't you hire someone to wash these windows?” he sneers, reaching out a long finger and dragging it through the condensation. He rubs his index against his thumb, aghast at the grey smudge.

“Why? You looking for work?” she snorts, crossing her arms. She turns and leans her back against the cold glass, facing him now. He stares down at her ridiculously diminutive height. Beside her he feels positively gargantuan. He straightens his back to full height, crosses his arms behind his back the way he always does when he feels threatened. Project strength. Broadcast authority. Lessons from his father that still snap his spine ramrod straight. This girl makes him feel shaken, threadbare. She wears a part of him away with each breath she takes.

“I doubt you could afford my rates,” he drawls, forces his stance to relax. “Solo should have been here by now.”

“The rain slows everyone down,” Rose says, remembering the moment he had first walked in, how a droplet of water had wandered down his temple, over his cheek. She wants to be that drop now. Her hand is aching to touch him and she tucks it into the pocket of her jeans. She's never stood this close to him before. His aftershave smells cool and crisp. There's a touch of irritation from shaving on the left side of his jaw that she wants to drag her tongue over. She wants to taste what makes him burn.

He shoots her a look, his cold eyes sharp as a drawn knife. “You know he's putting on an act, yes?”

“Who?” Rose asks, blinking up at him. Hux battles a foreign urge to tilt her chin up with his index finger.

“Ben Solo. He plays the lovestruck swain so well but I won't buy it. Some minx on a bike pedals past and a man with his power and influence loses all objectivity? He could have his pick of some of the most beautiful women in the world and he'd have me believe he's lost his head over some random girl wandering the streets of Seattle? There's an angle here I just haven't seen yet. There's something here I haven't worked out.”

Rose looks at him, tired by his spite. The cold window bleeds into her shirt, goosebumps prickle over her arms. “What if its exactly what he says? Love at first sight.”

Armitage turns without thinking towards her, aligning his body with her own. He can feel the heat of her crossed arms nearly touching his left ribs. They are both caught on the others thorns, bleeding redder still. The rain drums heavily against the pavement outside. Cars sweep down the road in long, hissing waves. A horn honks in the distance. He meets her eyes, feeling inexplicably lost.

“I don't believe in any of that,” Hux whispers as he stares down at her, his mouth dry, searching her face with narrowed eyes.

The raindrops batter the windowpane, the dim grey light leeches them both of color save for the flare of his copper hair.

“I know,” she says softly.

-


End file.
